To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

Time Passes: Chapters I–X

The Lighthouse: Chapters I–III, page 2

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Summary: Chapter I

Lily sits at breakfast, wondering what her feelings mean,
returning after ten years now that Mrs. Ramsay is dead. She decides
that she feels nothing that she can express. The entire scene seems
unreal and disjointed to her. As she sits at the table, she struggles
to bring together the parts of her experience. She suddenly remembers
a painting she had been working on years ago, during her last stay
at the Ramsays’, and the inspiration that the leaf pattern on the
tablecloth gave her. She decides that she will finish this painting
now, heads outside, and sets up her easel on the lawn. Upon her
arrival the previous night, she was unable to assuage Mr. Ramsay’s
need for sympathy, and she fears his interference with her current
project. She sets a clean canvas on the easel, but she cannot see
the shapes or colors that surround her because she feels Mr. Ramsay
bearing down on her. She thinks angrily that all Mr. Ramsay knows
how to do is take, while all Mrs. Ramsay did was give. As her host approaches,
Lily lets her brush fall to her side, convinced that it will be
easier to remember and imitate the sympathy that Mrs. Ramsay was
able to muster for her husband than to let him linger on the lawn
beside her.

Summary: Chapter II

Mr. Ramsay watches Lily, observing her to be “shrivelled
slightly” but not unattractive. He asks if she has everything she
needs, and she assures him that she does. Lily cannot give him the
sympathy he needs, and an awful silence falls between them. Mr.
Ramsay sighs, waiting. Lily feels that, as a woman, she is a failure
for not being able to satisfy his need. Eventually, she compliments
him on his boots, and he gladly discusses footwear with her. He
stoops to demonstrate the proper way to tie a shoe, and she pities
him deeply. Just then, Cam and James appear for the sojourn to the
lighthouse. They are cold and unpleasant to their father, and Lily
reflects that, if they so wished, they could sympathize with him
in a way that she cannot.

Summary: Chapter III

Lily sighs with relief as Mr. Ramsay and the children
head off for the boat. With Mr. Ramsay standing by, she had jammed
her easel into the ground at the wrong angle and taken up the wrong
brush. She rights the canvas, raises the correct brush, and wonders
where to begin. She makes a stroke on the canvas, then another.
Her painting takes on a rhythm, as she dabs and pauses, dabs and
pauses. She considers the fate of her painting, thinking that if
it is to be hung in a servant’s room or rolled up under a sofa,
there is no point in continuing it. The derogatory words of Charles
Tansley—that women cannot paint, cannot write—return to her, but
she maintains the rhythm of her work. She remembers a day on the
beach with Tansley and Mrs. Ramsay, and is amazed by Mrs. Ramsay’s
ability to craft substance out of even “silliness and spite.” She
thinks, perhaps, that there are no great revelations. There is,
to her, only the memory of Mrs. Ramsay making life itself an art.
Lily feels that she owes what revelation she has in this moment
to Mrs. Ramsay. On the edge of the water, she notices a boat with
its sail being hoisted and, sure that it belongs to the Ramsays,
watches it head out to sea.

Analysis—The Lighthouse: Chapters I–III

The structure of To the Lighthouse creates
a strange feeling of continuity between drastically discontinuous
events. “The Window” ends after dinner, as night falls; “Time Passes”
describes the demise of the house as one night passes into the next
over the course of ten years; “The Lighthouse” resumes in the morning,
at breakfast. Woolf almost suggests the illusion that Lily sits
at the table the morning after the dinner party, even though the
scene takes place a decade later. This structure lends the impression
that Mr. Ramsay’s voyage to the lighthouse with Cam and James occurs
the next day as James had hoped, though his world is now wholly
different.

In spite of these differences, the Ramsays’ house in
the Hebrides remains recognizable, as do the rhythmic patterns of
the characters’ consciousnesses. As Woolf resumes her exploration
of the subtle undercurrents of interpersonal relationships, she
begins with characters who are “remote” from one another. They occupy,
in fact, the same positions of private suffering as at the beginning
of Mrs. Ramsay’s magnificent dinner party. Mr. Ramsay, a man in
decline, is no longer imposing to Lily. Rather, he is awkward and
pathetic. His children are waging a barely veiled revolt against
his oppressive and self-pitying behavior. Still desperate for sympathy
but unable to obtain it from Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay turns to Lily
and his children to satisfy his need. Lily, on the other hand, still
feels unable to give of herself in this way. Her reluctance to show
sympathy to Mr. Ramsay recalls her reaction to Charles Tansley at
the dinner table. Then, as now, she cannot bring herself to soothe
the tortured male ego. The world, as a result of these disjointed
personalities and desires, seems “chaotic” and “aimless,” and Lily
concludes that the house is brimming with “unrelated passions.”